Many Conductors, One Symphony? Leading Knowledge Creation in Multidisciplinary Teams

Abstract

Multidisciplinary teams face a dilemma: while expertise diversity enriches information sources, it also brings coordination obstacles for co-creating knowledge. We address this desirability-difficulty trade-off by examining team leadership as a critical behavioral mechanism that links expertise diversity and knowledge creation. Using data from 91 multidisciplinary teams working in collaboration between a global pharmaceutical company and its research partners, our analysis reveals opposite effects of expertise diversity on two aspects of team leadership: expertise diversity increases the variance but decreases the mean of leadership behavior within the team. Further, whereas both aspects relate positively to knowledge creation, the benefit of the variance decreases as task uncertainty increases. Our findings have implications for the organizational knowledge creation and leadership literature, and for organizations aspiring to capitalize on high diversity of expertise in their work teams.